“When I was a girl, they gave me a card to check out library books,” the woman said. “Now it’s my husband.” She lit a cigarette. “Maybe mine knows him,” she added, and stole a glance at Klay’s card. She drew a quick breath. Without looking at Klay again, she gathered her things and hurried away. Klay looked down at his blue card. Ras Botha’s charges filled the card front and back and were scrawled vertically along the card’s edges in print too small to read.

Klay followed the other visitors and got in a long line for a metal detector and body search. The cigarette woman was three people ahead of him. When their line turned a corner Klay looked up, intending to catch her eye again, but she stared out a small window instead.

A hand touched Klay’s shoulder. “You don’t have to wait in line, Mr. Klay,” a guard said. “He’s expecting you.”

The cigarette woman shot him a last, appraising look as he walked past her, around the metal detector, and into the prison. The guard, whose name was Jacob, was about Klay’s size, dressed in a brown uniform, olive web belt, and black laced boots, but he was in poor condition and breathed heavily on the long walk, which took them up and down poorly lit stairwells and through long hallways whose walls were painted lemon yellow.

They passed men in orange prison uniforms stamped with “corrections” in circles, like leopard spots, working brooms and mop buckets. Several, he noticed, had the number twenty-six tattooed on their right hands. The prisoners paused as Klay approached, checked out his shoes, his watch, and his size. Some gave him chin juts and eye fucks. Others looked right through him.

“Anyone famous in here?” Klay asked as they walked.

“Some.”

Jacob named a few prisoners. Klay looked them up later. An Apartheid-era assassin. A billionaire mob boss from the Czech Republic. A pair of murdering twin brothers.

“All his friends,” Jacob said.

Jacob led Klay into an office marked “Warden.” The warden was not in, a receptionist declared. Jacob looked at Klay. “Botha flu,” he said, and opened the warden’s door.

Inside, Ras Botha was seated at a small conference table. Jacob indicated for Klay to sit at one end, across from Botha. Then he pulled a chair out for himself, took it across the room, and sat down behind Klay, against the wall.

“So, you do have some balls of your own,” Botha said. “I’m glad to see it.”

Botha wore blue jeans and a black golf shirt, a dive watch, and a gold wedding ring. On the table in front of him were two oranges loosely wrapped in a paper towel. He’s lost weight, was Klay’s first thought. Lines in Botha’s forehead had grown deeper than Klay remembered, and there was a cut over his left eye.